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Comment by stusmall

17 hours ago

>I hope announcements like this show that Rust is not a fledgling little language that moves fast and breaks things anymore

I see this on here a lot on this site, but Rust hasn't been that in over a decade. Rust's devotion to post 1.0 stability is massive and has involved some interesting design choices. I started writing run in 2015(?) and only hit one breaking change in the language. It was a niche bug in a macro that was fixed later in a later release.

Just watching hackernews you see lots of news about it, but these are additive and not breaking things. I was still writing lots of mio-style async code after async await was out. You don't have to adapt new style or libraries. I used to have a joke that you could tell a codebase's age based on the error handling libraries used, but even with that it was additive. Often multiple would exist in different parts of the same code base. "Oh wow, I've gone deep on this refactor.... I'm starting to see error_chain"

Hah, I remember error_chain. One of my projects during an internship was upgrading a bunch of the old error handling libraries to the new things. I'm glad that corner of the ecosystem has stabilized now.

At that same job we hit a pretty nasty breaking change where mem::uninitialized() was deprecated and this turned out to cause a lot of critical async libraries to explode at runtime. But these sorts of things don't really happen anymore. The editions system is an excellent design and a big contributor to making the language and stdlib reliable.